1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a control method, and a computer-readable medium and, more particularly, to a forcible stopping method of forcibly stopping a print job during the execution of the print job by a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a user transmits a job cancel request to a printer, each module in the printer forcibly stops the processing currently being executed. In this case, in some image processing modules, a control module needs to initialize a memory area in which image data which has already been output is stored, when executing a forcible stop. This makes it necessary to generate a new control sequence for a forcible stop. Accordingly, this complicates control associated with the printer, especially memory management. As a consequence, the serviceability of the control module of the printer may deteriorate.
As a result of the above background, some image processing modules in the printer cannot be forcibly stopped until the completion of a series of operations even if a user transmits a job cancel request to the printer. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-256179 discloses a stopping method for modules which cannot be forcibly stopped, which performs discard processing inside an image processing module when the image processing module cannot be forcibly stopped and the device on the subsequent stage has already been stopped. According to this technique, when a drawing unit is connected in series with an image processing module on the subsequent stage, the image processing module cannot be stopped until the completion of drawing processing by the drawing unit based on intermediate data. Furthermore, the time taken for the processing by the drawing processing module depends on the processing defined by intermediate data. It is likely that the user will execute job cancellation as the processing of print data takes time. That is, a job which is likely to be the one for which job cancellation is executed takes much time for completion of job cancellation.
In an arrangement in which a drawing processing module is connected in series with an image processing module which cannot be forcibly stopped, while the drawing processing module and the image processing module are executed at the time of print processing, it is not possible to forcibly stop the modules in accordance with job cancel requests from the user. For this reason, in some cases, it takes much time for the printer to complete job cancellation in response to a job cancel request from the user. This impairs the convenience to the user.